This blog is about my spare time projects or stuff that matters to me such as electronics, reverse engineering, computer science, embedded devices, security or digital forensics. It is not affiliated to my employer in any way. Posts may be either in English or in French.

This post will guide you through all the steps it took me to support challenges that were released in 2016 by Riscure. From schematics review to an automation script, you will learn how to extend Chipwhisperer-lite, a versatile platform for side channel attacks and glitching and using it to crack an AES 128bit encryption key in less than a minute.

This post provides additional technical details about the physical part of the encrypted USB attacks that we demonstrated a few month back in our talk at BlackHat USA 2017. In particular I will cover how to remove the epoxy and how to reball a BGA chip. If you are considering auditing your own USB key or are curious about the challenges we faced, this article is for you.

Welcome to my electronic lab! Over the last few years or so many people asked me about my personal lab, so today I am giving you a virtual tour of it.

We will go over what gear I use and how I set everything up so I can do my experiment efficiently. Along the way I will answer the questions that has been asked about my setup in my various posts. In particular, I will provide a rationale of why I choose one type of hardware versus another. The quantity of hardware described in this post might seems overwhelming but keep in mind here that it took me years to build this lab. I merely add a new piece here and there based of my needs and opportunity.

Disclaimer: I don’t claim my setup is the best but it works for my use-cases: tinkering with electronic, doing security research and repairing various pieces of equipment. If you have suggestions on how to improve it, let me know.

Lot of people complained during the past years that DPAPIck was only supporting Windows XP and Vista and basically wanted to know if one day we were going to support newer versions of Microsoft Windows.

Thanks to Francesco Picasso (@dfirfpi), this project now supports Windows versions from XP to the latest Windows 8.1 (sorry, we haven’t tested it on Windows 10 yet). He did the work and sent me a patch that allowed DPAPIck to run against Windows 7 blobs but it was also breaking XP support at the same time. So I took some extra time to give that a bit of polish and to improve a few things on how the tool was processing data.

First of all, I am pretty happy to write this article because I usually don’t have a lot of opportunities to write about forensics topics on this blog. The main reason for that situation is because I am almost always working on that field for my employer so this does not have a place on this blog . But this time it was related to a spare time project I did during my holidays!

You’re not going to have a lot of details about the whole project because it is still ongoing and moreover I am working on it with a friend and we hope to do a bigger publication once we are done. Anyway, I went through a lot a caveats so I thought it was worth writing about that step in our study.

Few times ago I have published an article about two RFID locks that I encountered while traveling and a rough blackbox analysis of these two technologies. Unfortunately, back then, I only had few samples of key cards regarding Vingcard’s locks and that led me to take false assumptions.

But I was lucky enough very recently as to meet this lock once more. And because it was a three weeks stay, it was pretty easy to purposely tell the reception that my card was not working anymore, a couple of times, in order to have them reprogram it (yay, I’m a bad guy!). The purpose here was, first, to check what values can change over time (they usually encode the duration of the stay instead of the checkout timestamp) and secondly, to ensure that there is not a kind of timestamp-dependant key.